The authors assess the effects of central bank governor appointments on financial market expectations of monetary policy. To measure these effects, they assemble a new dataset of appointment announcements from 15 industrialized countries and conduct an event-study analysis on exchange rates,...

This paper estimates the impact of monetary policy actions on bill, note, and bond yields, using data from the futures market for Federal funds to separate changes in the target funds rate into anticipated and unanticipated components. Bond rates' response to anticipated changes is essentially...

This paper analyzes the impact of unanticipated changes in the federal funds rate target on equity prices, with the aim of both estimating the size of the typical reaction and understanding the reasons for the market's response. We find that over the June 1989-December 2002 sample period, a...

This paper addresses the possible role of bond prices as operating or intermediate targets for monetary policy. The paper begins with a brief review of the mechanisms through which a central bank could, in theory, influence long-term interest rates, and continues with a brief narrative overview...

The swift growth of e-commerce and the Internet has led to the development of a new form of electronic funds transfer - the personal on-line payment - that uses web and e-mail technologies to initiate and confirm payments. This article describes this payment instrument and the trends that have...

Observers have relied increasingly on simple reaction functions, such as the Taylor rule, to assess the conduct of monetary policy. Applying this approach to deflationary or near-zero inflation environments is problematic, however, and this paper examines two shortcomings of particular relevance...

This paper takes up the issue of the flexibility of inflation targeting regimes, with the specific goal of determining whether the monetary policy of the Bank of England, which has a formal inflation target, has been any less flexible than that of the Federal Reserve, which does not have such a...